AMD's newest roadmap reveals a major shift in early 2010: the company will once again overhaul its socket architecture to make way for DDR3 support.

The new socket, dubbed G34, will also ship with two new second-generation 45nm processors. The first of these processors, 8-core Sao Paolo, is described as a "twin native-quadcore Shanghai processor" by one AMD engineer. Shanghai, expected to ship late this year, is AMD's first 45nm shrink of the ill-fated Barcelona processor.

Both of these new processors will feature four HyperTransport 3 interconnects, 12MB of L3 cache and 512KB L2 cache per core.

Intel's next-generation Nehalem chip, scheduled for launch late this year but already well leaked, is the first to feature tri-channel DDR3 memory support. AMD will up the ante in 2010, with registered and unregistered quad-channel DDR3 support. Current roadmaps claim standard support will include speeds from 800 to 1600 MHz.

AMD insiders would reveal very little about the G34 socket, other than its a derivative of the highly secretive G3 socket that was to replace Socket F (1207). As far as company documentation goes, G3 ceased to exist in March 2008, and has been replaced with the G34 program instead. The first of these sockets will be available for developers in early 2009.

We counted 1974 pin connects on the leaked G34 diagram -- 767 more pins than AMD's current LGA1207 socket. Given the additional interconnect pathways for DDR3 and the HyperTransport buses, a significant increase in the number of pins was to be expected.

The addition of a fourth HyperTransport link may prove to be one of the most interesting features of the Sao Paulo and Magny-Cours processors. In a full four-socket configuration, each physical processor will dedicate a HyperTransport link to each of the other sockets. This leaves one additional HyperTransport lane per processor, which AMD documentation claims will finally be used for its long-discussed Torrenza program.

The hype behind Torrenza largely disappeared after AMD's Barcelona launch sour, though the company has hinted before that Torrenza will make a perfect interconnect to GPUs or IBM Cell processors. This is exactly the type of setup roadmapped for the fastest public supercomputer in the world, IBM's Roadrunner.

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No, most people in America don't hate the French. Not at all! Go up to people, and ask them if they 'hate' the French; I seriously doubt you'll get anything like 60/40. There's literally no reason to.

In many ways, our cultures are different, but that's in no way spawning hatred on a mass scale.

I think if you were to run into anyone with resentment towards French, the underlying factor of that would seem to be 'they hate us too!' .. That's all.

Bring an average american, and an average french person together, and they'll most likely have the same likelyhood of becoming friends as any other two people. It's just complete idiocy to think we blindly hate each other under any circumstance.

So I must put this out there, because most people who comment are too extreme on everything; most likely from being alone at a computer with your emotions boiling for no rational reason. Either its this, its Vista, its the Xbox, or whatever. Silence, you idle minded people.

I don't know...retardation seems to be spreading like a virus around these parts (USA), with all the O'reily-ites, Hannity Heads, Coulter Creeps, Limbaughneers, etc. Sure, they have some valid opinions, and I'm sure there are at least some equivalents on the "left" as well, but the amount of idiocy I hear the fans of these clowns parroting is a sign of the times in which society has decimated itself exactly as it has in the past so many times, over and over. These parrots love to be a part of this team which has decided to hate France since they stood up to our then soon to be war / international crimes. Also, blind hatred is prevalent in mankind, not the opposite.

In fact, freedom and rationality seem to be more of an exception in our history than a norm, though just one who truly masters it tends to outshine a million who do not.

I'm not trying to buzzkill anyone, but in order to address a problem you have to see it, though plenty will never see it as a problem.